I'm a writer, journalist, and the editor of The Gambit, the alt-weekly newspaper in New Orleans.

Journalism: My work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Globe & Mail (Canada), The Times- Picayune (New Orleans), The Oregonian, and Willamette Week, as well as in magazines including Details, Vogue, Publishers Weekly, and Portland Monthly.

Publishing:Tight Shot, my first novel, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Its sequel, Hot Shot, was roundly ignored by everyone, but was a far better book. I'm also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Stage: I was a member of the Groundlings and Circle Repertory West in Los Angeles, and am a playwright (see "Stage" in the right-hand rail).

August 03, 2008

Thirty-one teams
were selected to strut, soar and ultimately splash into the
Willamette’s waters, including a final wildcard team chosen by a public
vote.

Flugtag, which
means “flying day” in German, gives everyday Joes (and Janes!) the
chance to be heroes for the day when they launch their homemade
human-powered flying machines off a 25-foot high flight deck and into
Red Bull Flugtag fame.

Thirty-one teams have been selected to strut, soar and ultimately splash into the Willamette's waters, including a final wildcard team that was chosen by a public vote.

Flugtag, which means "flying day" in German, gives everyday Joes (and Janes!) the chance to be heroes for the day when they launch their homemade human-powered flying machines off a 25-foot high flight deck and into Red Bull Flugtag fame.

The first Red
Bull Flugtag was held in Vienna in 1991. Since then, more than 40 Red
Bull Flugtags have been held around the world – from London to San
Francisco – attracting up to 300,000 spectators at one event!

The international
flight distance record stands at 195 feet set in 2000 at Red Bull
Flugtag Austria. North America’s longest flight took place at Red Bull
Flugtag Nashville in 2007 with a distance of 155 feet.

The first Red Bull Flugtag was held in Vienna in 1991. Since then, more than 40 Red Bull Flugtags have been held around the world -- from London to San Francisco -- attracting up to 300,000 spectators at one event!

The international flight distance record stands at 195 feet set in 2000 at Red Bull Flugtag Austria. North America's longest flight took place at Red Bull Flugtag Nashville in 2007 with a distance of 155 feet.

This isn't a fuss over a misspelled word here or a split infinitive there; mistakes are inevitable at the best of papers, and by the best of writers and editors. This is the work of someone who doesn't know how to write, or just doesn't care enough to get it right.

If a newspaper can't master the basics of spelling and grammar, how can it expect readers to trust the information it presents?

Given the English-as-a-second-language level of this reporting, I've got a suspicion as to what might be going on here, and it involves outsourcing -- there's certainly precedent. And I kinda hope it's true, because I wouldn't want to think that anyone at a mid-sized American newspaper didn't even have passable, basic high school English skills.

The
Tribune described this move as freeing its staff up to post more news
online and eliminate some of the –- environmentally and economically --
wasteful paper product.

On Monday, the newspaper will launch a daily online paper at portlandtribune.com.

The paper's president said the strategic move will make the paper more environmentally friendly.

He also said that it will allow the paper to cover breaking news like never before.

The changes come at a difficult time financially for the print industry.

"The
cost of newsprint has gone up 21 cents since Dec. 1 of last year. What
we're trying to do is manage the publishing side and online side in a
robust economic way," Portland Tribune President Steve Clark said.

Clark said the company is laying off six employees with the changes.

Sweet, sympathetic, and a bit PR-ish -- but howcum no mention of the fact that the Trib and KPTV are partners?The paper and the TV station have paired up on stories before, and the partnership was (responsibly) mentioned in Clark's original letter. In the past, that disclosure's been boilerplate in other stories that have run on KPTV about the Trib.

It's basic conflict-of-interest, freshman J-school stuff. But in this particular case, it just didn't seem worth mentioning at KPTV.

It's a strange, sad letter -- a combo plate of defensiveness and buzzwords:

We were the first to identify sustainability as the future of our
communities and worthy of its own major publication: Sustainable Life....We become even more environmentally sensitive by launching the nation’s
most sustainable daily newspaper in America’s most sustainable
community.

"Sustainable," in Portlandese, is like "family values" -- it's an amorphous, commonly recognized Good Thing that no one can quite define; it means whatever you want it to mean at the moment. In this case, it seems that the Trib is trying to say that going weekly has its upside because it's Kind To Trees.

What else?

This means your best source of local news – on the Web and in print –
just got better as we expand breaking coverage of Portland and regional
news...

In moving to a once a week print newspaper and online daily, we will employ fewer people in some departments.

How they're going to expand news coverage by employing fewer people isn't quite explained, but I guess it's the kind of the thing you have to say in situations like this. What you don't have to do, though, is take potshots at your competitors as you're bailing water.

Such as The Oregonian:

The Tribune consistently has defied those readership trends and
criticisms by providing print and Web journalism that robustly and
increasingly serves Portland in ways that other media – including the
state’s 158-year-old daily newspaper – do not.

Such as bloggers (also known, in many cases, as "your readers"):

We fully expect that there will be those who will criticize our
strategy. Through the years, we have routinely been scorned by some,
including bloggers who are prone to vitriolic negativity.

Such as the other alt-weeklies:

Other
comments may come from competitors such as Willamette Week – which
makes a practice of throwing stones at us and others, but rarely praise.

Oh, grow up. The Tribune isn't a bad paper, and it's not its fault that newsprint costs are soaring, advertising is down (probably forever), and the industry's entire future is in question. I hope the Tribune survives and manages to come up with a "sustainable" business model. But flailing around, sniping at, and whining about your competitors just makes you look petty and small.

In summer 2007, the O was going through its second "voluntary retirement offer" in two years. At the time, publisher Fred Stickel said: "This voluntary retirement offer is necessary in order to keep our
company payroll in line with revenue. Unlike other companies, we do not
reduce the size of the staff through layoffs."

But here's the money quote:

Here at The Oregonian, we are still fully committed to our pledge to regular, full-time employees with regards to job security:

“No
full-time, non-represented regular employee will ever be laid off due
to economic conditions or the introduction of new technology so long as
they successfully complete their probationary period, continue to do
their job satisfactorily, are willing to retrain if necessary, and we
continue to publish this newspaper.”

There will be no change
in our commitments to non-represented full-time, regular employees. We
shall continue honoring them in the future, as we have in the past.

Part of me thinks this is laudable and wishes other publishers would go on the record this boldly.

And another part of me thinks that the continued emphasis on "full-time" was a shrewd bit of wiggle room by a company whose corporate eye was on the dying sparrow, even back in summer 2007.

O cynical me.

(By the way: in the 2007 buyout, they gave the buyout-ers a year's salary and full medical and dental benefits to the age of 65, which is by any modern standard pretty generous. I'll be curious to see what they offer up to the part-timers as compared to the old-timers.)

May 01, 2008

First Oregon Media Insiders reported, then the Willamette Week's Byron Beckconfirmed, that The Oregonian is about to offer all its part-time employees, in all departments, a buyout:

In an unprecedented move, every part-time employee at The O (that
tallies up to around 300 people company-wide) is being offered a buyout
by the powers that be (we heard it's driven by publisher Fred Stickel's
office). In the latest cost-cutting measure during difficult economic times in the newspaper industry, the O's
part-time employees have been told they will receive letters in the
mail in the next week addressing their personal situations (salary,
benefits, etc.).

And now Matt Davis at the Portland Mercury says that the O's competitor, the twice-weekly Portland Tribune, is hemorrhaging as well:

The Portland Tribune has been reportedly canning newsroom
people today, and may go one day a week.

This all comes on the heels of some other things that I'd been hearing (the Trib eliminating all freelancers, and the Willamette Week paring its editorial budget to the quick). I never worked a hell of a lot for any of these places, but I'm sure glad I got out of that media market. Awful.

Update: Now Beck is reporting the Trib has:

laid off a news writer, a Web reporter and nearly the entire copy editing staff. We've also heard from at least one Trib insider that the paper will drop from twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) to once a week, on Thursdays.

Sad.

No copy editors? A good copy editor is worth a dozen mid-level managers.

And...once-a-week publication?!?!

Will it become the city's third alt-weekly? What the hell kind of business strategy is that?

The smartest thing the Trib could do is tack hard-right; that's the only market left in Portland. The city's already got the institutional left-leaning daily, the established alt-weekly, and the snarky alt-alt-weekly that's snapping at both their heels. Seems like the smartest thing to do would be to morph into a contrarian publication that snipes at all of them, rather than a sad mashup of all three, scrabbling for the same eyeballs and advertisers.

BOOKS

Booklist:
"A worthy successor to Tight Shot, Allman's insider view of the seamier side of Hollywood is not only hip and entertaining but also has something serious to say about our insatiable hunger for tabloid thrills."

Washington Post:
"Barbed, breezy and often pretty funny...sharp and entertaining. Allman can be very funny, and Hot Shot complements nicely the less forgiving takes on Los Angeles as the future of us all. "

----------

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE
BEST FIRST NOVEL
MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA

Booklist:
"Allman turns a very sardonic pen loose on Hollywood's glitz-and-glamour crowd in this entertaining first novel... An impressive debut and an almost sure thing for a sequel."

STAGE

BOO AND THE SHREVEPORT BABY

A French Quarter convenience-store clerk has a hilariously traumatic encounter with a pair of Shreveport tourists. Part of Native Tongues 3 (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2001; Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago; 2006).

A recreation of an evening at the notorious New Orleans 1950s female-impersonator nightclub My-O-My (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2005).

THE LOVE GIFT

A lonely man discovers purpose when he intercepts a televangelist's letters from his neighbor's mailbox. Part of the Dramarama New Plays Festival (Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; 2004).

BABYDADDY

A black father discovers that no good deed goes unpunished when he helps his white neighbor bail her son out of Orleans Parish Prison. (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2004; Walker Percy Southern Playwrights Festival, Covington; 2007).

TWO IN THE BUSH

An evening of comedies. In The Stud Mule, the world's richest woman arranges to be impregnated by a doltish escort; in Snatching Victory, an earnest college student runs afoul of her lecherous professor and the dour head of a women's-studies department (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2003).

NEW ORLEANS READING

Patty Friedmann: A Little Bit RuinedOne of the first post-Katrina novels, and probably destined to be one of the best. Friedmann's sequel to Eleanor Rushing finds her crazy heroine still holding everything together after the storm (after a fashion), until she has to leave New Orleans and she falls apart physically as well as mentally. Mordantly, morbidly funny.

Tom Piazza: Why New Orleans MattersThe best post-Katrina book I've read. In 150 small pages, Piazza explicates the New Orleans experience simply and beautifully. I'll be passing this one on to anyone who wonders "But why would anyone want to live there?".